We all are being hacked, hijacked, and mind-naped. Yah, that’s right. I just finished reading the book, The Hacking of The American Mind by Dr. Robert Lustig and it was truly eye opening. As a Naturopath I already knew how excess fat and sugar was playing havoc in our bodies, however I learned how our brain chemistry and our emotions get altered by too much pleasure.

You might say, no, never too much pleasure but too much stimulation whether it is coming from a food source, or anything external will cause your dopamine ( a neurotransmitter) levels to sky-rocket and then crash and burn. This in turn will shut off your satiating mechanism in your brain saying you’ve had enough. So you are on an endless and vicious quest to satisfy your cravings.

We are being bombarded by food commercials that entice your senses to eat, advertisements to buy, the latest, greatest, biggest, shiniest, sexiest new thing that will make you feel good. We have become a consumer based society that has been hacked in believing we need more, more and more.

This is not how we are meant to live, trapped and handcuffed to corporate propaganda. We do have a choice. We can educate ourselves to recover our health and happiness.

The #1 best decision you can do for yourself right now is to take back your buying power and purchase simple natural foods and things.

We must realized that this virus has infiltrated our biochemistry and is controlling us. Then together we can unlock the gates, chains and shackles that have been keeping us hostage from the trance that we’ve been hypnotized to believe is just the way life is.

The greatest gift we were giving is the ability to choose. At any time we can choose a different thought. What will you choose?

Here is a story from a contributing blogger. Their information is at the bottom if you wanted to learn more.

“The light within is a quiet source of truth and guidance. The key is to be still and know. If I am quiet for just a moment and listen and wait, the inner wisdom reveals the next indicated step.” – Robert, Addiction Survivor

Addiction is one of the greatest struggles someone could ever face. Not only does it wreak havoc on our bodies, but it turns our own minds against us by fooling us into thinking we can’t survive without the very substances that are destroying us. The silver lining is that there is always help available to those who are lost in their addictions, but there’s a catch: you must want to get better in order to heal.

Dean’s inspiring story demonstrates just how important this mindset is — and proves that there is always light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how long the journey there may be.

***

After moving from one end of the world to another when he was only seven, Dean did whatever he could not to feel like an outsider. Unfortunately, this often led him to make some destructive decisions.

“I was always trying to find a way to fit in,” he remembered. “Around the time I was 12 or 13, I started drinking alcohol and smoking weed. I spent years of my life as a pothead.”

He was hit hard when his parents decided to get divorced, and he started using even more dangerous drugs in order to cope.

“My friends started taking Roxycontin, Oxycontin,” he said. “I remember the very first time that I tried it. I wish I could go back to that first day and tell myself what was going to happen to me if I took that pill. I had no prior knowledge about opiates and didn’t realize how addictive they were. I became addicted really quickly.”

After six months, though, Dean realized he was on a dangerous path, and he sought treatment. Unfortunately, he didn’t yet have the mindset he needed in order to face his addiction issues.

He admitted, “At that time, I really didn’t believe I was an addict. I relapsed pretty quickly after that experience.”

He reached out for help again and re-entered treatment with a fresh perspective — but even that didn’t last.

“My second time in rehab was a three-month inpatient rehab. It was really intense. I had almost two years of sobriety after that: I was following the steps and had a sponsor — but I didn’t follow through.”

When he hit another difficult period, his addicted brain once again took over the part of his mind that knew he needed to take better care of himself.

“Around 12 months into my sobriety, my parents were going through another divorce,” he said. “Around my 18-month milestone, I stopped using the program I built for myself. I started telling myself, ‘I’m not a real addict. I can beat this.’ So, I started drinking and smoking weed again with the help of an unhealthy relationship I had with a girl. Within a few months, I was doing heroin again, too.”

Despite his struggles, Dean persisted — he knew he had to get help, and no matter how many times he fell, he realized he had to keep trying. He reached out to several different facilities, but his past experiences with rehab taught him that he needed something a little more unique, something that would treat his addiction with a holistic, rather than simply medical, approach.

That’s when he learned about adventure therapy, and found a place that offered this unique treatment and could start treating him immediately. Using a blend of individual and group therapy as well as activities like hiking and ziplining, he finally learned the skills he now knows he was missing all along.

“I learned balance,” he said. “I obviously had been in programs before, but at [this rehab center], I learned that a balance of my mind, body and spirit was the key to unlock my brain. I know the 12 steps and the rooms of AA and NA — I know the song and dance to acquire ‘clean time.’ But I was working 12-, 16-, 18-hour shifts — often times 14 days in a row without a day off. My mind, body and spirit were unbalanced, which pushed me into a depression, and that let me slip back into my addiction after almost having two years clean. [This facility] opened my eyes to what life can be like in balance.”

Dean feels that it all came down to changing his mindset.

“I learned that I was putting up a lot of roadblocks in my life: things like, ‘I can’t do this,’ ‘I’m not good enough,’ ‘I’m not smart enough.’”

Now, he puts what he learned into practice every day.

“I stick to my balanced program: mind, body and spirit,” he explained. “I keep those three things in mind and I do what I need to do to fulfill those needs. I go to meetings, I go to the gym, I talk to other people in the program, I connect with other alumni on Facebook.”

If you or someone you know is struggling, don’t be afraid to get help. As Dean proved, there is no shame in falling a few times as long as you get back up each time. Sometimes, it’s as simple as having a changed mindset, a renewed perspective — and a genuine willingness to get back on the right path.

Constance Ray started Recoverywell.org with the goal of creating a safe place for people to share how addiction has affected them, whether they are combating it themselves or watching someone they care about work to overcome it. The goal is to share stories of hope from survivors who know that the fight against addiction is one worth having, because no matter how it affects you, life can get better.

What triggers your feelings? Do you believe that it is the outside world that makes you feel a certain way? Do you react to what people say, do, or how they behave? Your feelings are an indicator of who you really are. Your feelings than get projected into an emotion. Emotions are the labels we give to our feelings. Say that you feel sad, well, the sadness is the emotion and the feeling could be discomfort in your body. All our feelings are cellular memories that we are bringing up over and over again. It is as if we are really living in the past. What we may act like in our outer world could be totally different than what we are truly feeling. It is who I want you to think I am. This is our facade. This gap creates ambiguity within the body, causing stress. What if you could go through a looking glass and see yourself for who you really are. Beyond the feelings and labels we have come to memorize as us? You can learn to liberate yourself from feelings that keep you a prisoner in your body. The looking glass is meditation. It is going beyond the illusion of time, space, personality, and form. When you break the patterns that keep you addicted to the same feelings over and over, causing the same emotions to spring up, you will become a new person. You are no longer attached to the limiting feeling and you have closed the gap between you and you. You will have traveled through the looking glass and reflecting back a new you!

Once Upon a time, people relied on old knowledge of living off the land rather than shops, for their source of food, clothing and other such necessities. Our modern world has evolved out of this ancient one. Unfortunately the course we took as a whole, has separated nature out of the equation. Most people have forgotten the old ways. Knowledge is the key to success, and nature is the key to knowledge. When you study nature, all the mysteries of life reveal themselves. All the answers are hidden in the very thing that we over look. Even a single blade of grass has knowledge in it. The natural laws of the universe have been given to us to explore, and live in harmony with. This is our play ground. So why would we want to decimate our world? I believe that the only reason is, that we forgot about the old knowledge. This is the same reason why there is so much addiction, distraction, depression, and disease. Because we separated from the truth of who we are. We are creators, here to create our best life. To manifest our deep desires, we must connect with nature and the old knowledge.When we become whole in body, mind and spirit, we will remember who we really are. So let’s go back and read the story. Once upon a time when we were all connected.